The Sheaf

In today's media lesson I did my first piece of research. As a class we looked at the University of Saskatchewan's student newspaper. This newspaper is written, edited and published by students for students. It has been the U o S's newspaper since 1912 and is the largest of its kind in the province.

After looking at the main aspects of the newspaper such as distribution, purpose and content I came about some ideas that I thought I could use for my magazine and also some that I could not use.

The Sheafis is a weekly newspaper and is available throughout the academic school year. It is available from stands at busy traffic areas. The target audience for my magazine is 6th form students (16-18 years of age). I decided that my magazine will not be weekly but fortnightly because realistically students and teachers do not have alot of spare time within the learning programme to achieve a deadline of a week to produce a magazine and have time to study/teach.

The Sheaf is funded by the students - the students pay at the beggining of the year for the sheaf and then theyare entitled to every copy of the sheaf. This would be very difficult to achieve because 6th form education is free and therefore there is not any fee's to pay. So I decided that the magazine will be sold for £1 and will be available during morning registration from form tutors.

The content of the newspaper had a variety of entertainment and interactive sections for students to write in and express their views. I will take this into account and advertise an opinions page for sixth form students to comment on the upcoming or recent events being advertised. I will also adapted this idea further and have some sort of competition poll which will reveal a selected winner in each issue.

Using The Sheaf as research I know what to incorporate into my magazine which will work and should attract readers and also what does not seem appropriate due to the target audience.